Backrooms is a nightmare worth having more than once

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The raw materials of many nightmares consist of futility — like the maddening sensation of trying to run but being slowed by some force beyond your power and the setting of somewhere familiar that somehow isn’t. Likewise, those are the twin engines of Backrooms, another mind-warping horror offering from A24 Films that debuted in May 2026.

On its surface, Backrooms is a “through-the-looking-glass” story, in which a person living in an ostensibly “normal” world mysteriously slips into another one that operates in a parallel realm with its own rules. And that’s about as far as it might have gone, if not for director and co-writer Kane Parsons.

At the tender age of 21, he has mined his anxious generational milieu — which includes viral YouTube videos — to burst onto the big screen with one of the most highly regarded horror flicks of the year, combining nervy psychological twists with nail-biting chase sequences and a truly unsettling aesthetic sensibility. 

But understanding Backrooms and its resonance requires delving into the chronically online existence well known to people born and raised amid the explosion of high-speed, low-cost video streaming. The titular “Backrooms” are nothing less than an urban legend built in real-time by members of Gen Z and, increasingly, Gen Alpha.

The Backrooms started on the “image-based bulletin board” 4chan, where anonymous users post whatever comes into their heads. Originally, the “Backrooms” phenomenon consisted of images of desolate spaces bathed in sallow overhead light and seemingly extending into an infinity of contextless emptiness. The best way for “older folks” to imagine the aesthetic is to describe it as an expanse of interconnected, abandoned 1990s-era offices.

The tableaux of scenes of purposeless enormity are occasionally punctuated by half-glimpsed creatures, wandering on spindly legs in half-shadow. It’s implied that such beings are (maybe) lurking around every blind corner and in any of the never-ending hallways and alcoves along the winding, interminable maze. It’s the definition of disorientation.

Parsons brought online virality to the concept with his web series on YouTube under the handle Kane Pixels, giving the old 4chan images life through found-footage-style snippets that earned about 200 million views. Along the way, Parsons built a complex lore in which viewers were taken along on a journey encountering stranger and stranger spaces, more and more dread-inducing entities, and a sinister purpose pursued by the so-called Asynce Research Institute.

He’s basically taken all that to the next level in the film, with the familiar visual elements in place (and then some), but centered Clark — a boozy, self-sabotaging sad-sack furniture salesman played by Chiwetel Ejiofor — who “clips” into the Backrooms through the basement of his shop and brings along his employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her stoner/videographer boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to explore them. Along the way, he drags his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) into the topsy-turvy labyrinth, at (or near) the center of which is his own tortured psychology (or maybe hers?). 

Overall it’s a stress-inducing, sometimes woozy, occasionally infuriating experience to watch — not unlike a nightmare from which you’re happy to wake up, but might not mind having sometime again.

Stream it on Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple TV and other platforms.